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If anyone asks me why a foreigner should learn French, I think I’ve found the definitive answer. “You must learn French so you can enjoy De cape de crocs“.  I must thank klari for the revelation, since she lent me the first 8 volumes of this masterpiece….

Don Lope de Villalobos y Sangrin and Armand Raynal de Maupertuis: at your service

This series of bandes dessinées, (the title of which translates roughly as “Capes and Fangs”), recount the adventures of two swashbuckling gentlemen of fortune, a Spanish wolf and French fox, who (along with a rabbit), chase treasure, fortune and beautiful princesses from Renaissance Venice to the ends of the Earth… and beyond.

Along the way, they meet pirates, Turkish galley captains, sultry Spanish maidens, murderous armies of mimes, a mad German scientist, the King of the Moon, a dastardly conquistador, roaming herds of bagpipes, horrible sea monsters… oh, and did I mention beautiful princesses?

If you think you’ve read some of the storyline before, you probably have, and the intertextuality of the adventure is one of its joys: mixing Alexandre Dumas with Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac, the stories leap from one famous theme to the next, and back again, sprinkled with swordfights, sea battles, high-speed chases, and all threaded together by Alain Ayroles’ writing, swinging between silly wordplay (Posez ce lapin!) and the language of Molière.

The quality of the storyline (and particularly Jean-Luc Masbou’s art) may mean that one day De cape et de crocs is translated into English, but the transition will be difficult. For one thing, much of the dialogue (and duels) is rendered in alexandrins, the meter of much poetry of the French Renaissance. The only way to truly enjoy these passages is to read them aloud:

Dix gens de ta farine en deux vers je terrasse! Sens-tu sous mes soufflets ton rictus qui s’éfface?

Fasseyant va le foc de ton discours fumeux, quand sur la mer des mots voile au vent je me meus!*

Anthea Bell may have done a fairly good job with transferring the humour of Astérix into English, but good luck to the translator given the job of turning all this into witty, rhyming couplets!

As a mere anglo-saxon, there are probably many hundreds of jokes and references I don’t “get”, but even for a semi-literate foreigner, De cape et de crocs demonstrates once again what a powerful and inventive form the bande dessinée can be.

CARNE Y SANGRE !
MAUPERTUIS OSE ET RIT !

*Tome 7, p. 5

Sonny Rollins Quintet
Barbican, London
20th November 2010
Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Kobie Watkins, drums; Russell Malone, guitar; Sammy Figueroa, percussion

Age has not wearied Sonny Rollins, but it has reduced his gait to a slow, cautious waddle. Draped in a generous red silk shirt, crowned with a halo of grey frizz that recalled Arthur Rubenstein, Sonny Rollins emerged from behind a black curtain and swayed his way slowly to the front of the stage and the Barbican Theatre gave the man and his band a warm, heartfelt welcome.

Here, in front of us, stood a true mythic figure of music, one of the last men left standing from that famous generation of American musicians who defined modern jazz.  And this guy was going to play. For us. The expectation in the room was almost overwhelming.

Sonny Rollins – North Sea Jazz Festival, July 2010 – Evert-Jan (Creative Commons)

Despite the rapturous ovation that greeted the band, the gig started slowly. The quintet, slightly adrift on the wide Barbican stage, searched in vain for its mojo.  The opening tune, an 8-bar two chord vamp, had all the charm of a raucous soundcheck, and it took fully three songs, (half an hour), for the engineers to find a proper balance, allowing Bob Cranshaw’s bass and Russell Malone’s guitar to finally emerge from the murk.

Riding over the top of the band was Mr Rollin’s enormous, vocalised tenor saxophone. Sonny Rollins may no longer be able to outrun an advancing wall of lava, but his sound is still volcanic: broad, rough-hewn, scratchy as scoria.

His solos reminded me of a saxophone-playing friend of mine, who once commented to me “The best thing about Sonny Rollins is he doesn’t have any licks you can copy.” Even if the first third of the concert lacked inspiration, you got the impression that Rollins and his collaborators never gave up searching, grasping for the moment when everything would come together.

The “click” finally happened on the fourth tune: an unnamed funk groove, Russell Malone laying out an unexpected line worthy of a James Brown rhythm section. Watkin and Cranshaw obliged by accelerating the tempo ever-so-slightly, and finally the taper was lit.

Rollins waddled along the line of footlights, pouring out notes, quoting show-tunes and Pop Goes the Weasel, stopping in front of audience members to dedicate a phrase or two to each, before moving on, his saxophone swaying like a cradle in the storm, waiting for the bough to break. The gig was on.

Sonny Rollins – New York, September 2010 – Mr Mystery (Creative Commons)

As the evening progressed, the man’s purpose become clear – he was here to play music, and to play as much music as he could.  Only a musician of Rollins’ stature could flick off a rendition of Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood without ever bothering to play the melody. The climax came on the penultimate tune: a swinging version of Why Was I Born? where Rollins paced the width of the stage while engineering a solo of uncommon beauty.

There were some unusual choices of settings for his sidemen to take the spotlight: a slow, early-set ballad was the moment for Mr Rollins to trade fours with Sammy Figueroa’s congas, while the 3/4 tempo of Some Day I’ll Find You provided the frame for Kobie Watkins to let loose on drums. Russell Malone’s guitar was consistently tasteful, and occasionally audacious – he even permitted himself an extended reconstruction of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme on a middle chorus.

The gig closed with a few words of wisdom from the man himself, who recalled with humility his younger days gigging in London with Ronnie Scott and friends.  The band stretched out for a rollicking calypso finale on Don’t Stop the Carnival, and the groove bounced in our heads all the way home along the Northern Line and through the foggy streets of Islington.

This was a gig that, if only momentarily transcendant, was all the more special for those rare, precious minutes when Sonny Rollins – stately, majestic and deliberate in his ninth decade – made the stage positively glow.

Image: Evert-Jan (Creative Commons)

EDIT: 22/11/2010 Corrected name of guitarist (Russell Malone) and spelling of Sammy Figueroa

Today I visited the Palais de Tokyo for the first time. My visit didn’t convince me that contemporary art isn’t just a series of confidence tricks played on a gullible public. Somebody needs to spend some time explaining it all to me.

Palais de Tokyo (1937): Architecture, graffiti,  pond, dead leaves, rain on pavement, glass box on roof

Unfinished Tidying of Chairs, Or Possibly Art (2010): chair, chair, chair (folding), chair

Jeans Filled with Concrete in a Circle and a Sign on the Wall (2010): Jeans, concrete, sign, wall

It’s fair to say that France doesn’t have a international broadcast news service of the stature or popularity of the BBC World Service… and France’s international TV service in English, France24, (a pet project of Jacques Chirac instituted in the last days of his presidency) is worthy but rather under-resourced, and frankly looks and sounds like a struggling local cable news from Minnesota.

However, one of the small pleasures of living in Paris is tuning in to Radio France Internationale (RFI) on 89.0 FM. For news in the morning, I find it a much better source for a roundup of international news than the local news stations. Like the World Service, RFI is jointly funded by the state broadcaster and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and most of the time, seems to maintain its editorial independence.

France Inter, France Info and the private stations RTL and Europe1 are often thoughtful and interesting. But they are dominated by big-name media stars and an interminable analysis of domestic French politics that often leaves me longing for something that isn’t Eric Woerth’s latest scandal, more speculation on the imminent cabinet reshuffle, or wall-to-wall coverage of French sailors in the Route du Rhum.

By contrast, RFI seems refreshingly free of big-name media stars, and is just as likely to spend 15 minutes examining the US mid-term elections as it is to interview a foreign relations expert on Burma, or cut to live to a reporter in Ouagadougou to talk about their recent International Festival of Contemporary Theatre.

The Maison de Radio France, by the Seine in the 16th arrondissement

RFI broadcasts in 19 different languages overseas, but its French service is unapologetically focused on sub-Saharan africa, where it enjoys the largest audience of any Francophone radio station in the world – between 30 and 45 million listeners. Listening to RFI opens up a continent of politics that is rarely discussed in English language meda: for example RFI’s coverage of the recent elections in Guinea and Ivory Coast was fascinating.

Among Parisian listeners, the station caters largely to an audience in the suburbs. While France Inter often sounds like the 6th arrondissement arguing with the 7th arrondissement, RFI’s focuses on events happening in the often unloved swathes of le 93 and le 94:  film festivals in Montreuil, schools in crisis in Aulnay-sous-Bois, or the plight of the homeless in Chelles. It makes for fascinating listening, and provides a very different image of the city than one gets from most of the French mainstream press.

I rather thought that this was a fabulous idea: a “flash mob” choir of 650, singing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah in Macy’s department store in Philadelphia, surprising the early Christmas shoppers.

They were accompanied by the shop’s pipe organ (only in America), which is apparently the largest pipe organ in the world (also, only in America).

It’d be great to do something like this in Paris… perhaps in Printemps or the Les Halles shopping centre?